Acumium’s Staff Is a Bunch of Slackers

Only a few short months ago, Acumium decided to test out Slack, the fastest growing internal-communication platform on the market. Since its release in February of 2014, it has gained over 1 million users, and it’s still growing. We were curious to see what all the excitement was about, so we gave it a try. It didn’t take long for us to adopt it (and many of us fell in fast love with it). There was some slight apprehension at first, between our development and marketing teams we have a lot of tools to keep track of, but those fears soon faded away.

Acumium has adopted Slack for many reasons, and we’re going to share our top five with you.

Reason #1: It fits perfectly with our company culture.

We take our jobs seriously at Acumium, but we never take ourselves too seriously. Slack makes communication easy and fun. It’s a great forum for professional communication that accommodates the flexibility to be as to-the-point or tongue-in-cheek as the occasion dictates. For example, people here have been known to add a crab emoji to indicate they received a monthly campaign report. It has become our water cooler chat room. We get work done, and have fun making memes and GIFs as we do it.

Reason #2: It benefits our team members.

Slack has contributed to knocking down the knowledge silos in the office. One of the many great things about Slack is the soft knowledge it provides for everyone. Slack allows team members to monitor the constant stream of communication that goes on around a project, all in one place. This allows the team to be aware of what is going on, even if it doesn’t directly involve them. This transparency allows everyone involved an easy and efficient way to keep up with what is going on holistically with a project.

And it really benefits our new employees. Typically when you start a new job you start with an empty inbox. Unless a fellow employee decides to forward you important emails or take time to catch you up on everything that has happened with a project before you began, you start with a steep learning curve on projects, company operations and culture. Slack helps us speed up the onboarding process. New employees can go back through all the communication around projects they are assigned to, getting them up and rolling as fast as possible.

Reason #3: It integrates with our needs.

We are guilty of using a lot of tools at Acumium, but Slack helps us keep them all organized. Slack comes with a lot of integrations that are built into it that we have found very useful. But if you need an integration that is not native to the platform, there are services that can help your team integrate basically any tool you need into Slack.

Reason #4: It has rockin’ customer service.

The Slack team is fantastic to work with. It’s clear they have made customer service a core part of their business strategy. Submitting feedback is easy – you simply type a message like you would to a teammate, but precede it with “/feedback,” and off it goes. The team at Slack is quick to respond, witty, and always helpful. Not only are they responsive, they listen and take the feedback to heart. We can tell it’s a healthy platform by the frequency with which it is updated. We know the Slack team is giving it the love and attention it needs.